USAA Technical Architect Keith
Wilson is photographed at the
USAA office in San Antonio.
all applications more usable
and accessible was essential
for meeting across-the-board
computing expectations.
In an effort to modernize
this environment and provide
cloud-based solutions, USAA
could have rewritten its
applications or purchased
packaged software. But its
existing applications were
expressly tailored and updated
for USAA's unique business flow
and represented its consolidated
system of record. Getting rid of
them would have meant the loss
of a battle-tested legacy, but
keeping up with always changing
user wish lists is no small chore
in the classic-app world. It can
take months and sometimes years
to alter monolithic applications
and update them, only to discover
they're already out of date. And so
the cycle repeats.
As Wilson notes, "Today, you
expect that your software stack is
going to change more frequently
than it had in the past, when
you had to put a lot of effort
and time into updating your
applications. So you need to align
to industry-standard development
tools, technologies and processes
that aren't restricted to your
particular environment, allowing
you to leverage what you have
and make it much easier to meet
future computing demands."
Hybrid Platforms
To meet its goals, USAA needed
to adopt a mechanism by which
its developers could integrate
applications across the stack
as needed and then deliver the
results, even via the cloud, to a
variety of essential environments,
such as advanced web browsers
and mobile clients. After
establishing this outline, USAA
began looking at RESTful APIs,
which allow users to deliver and
populate back-end resources-
16 // JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 ibmsystemsmag.com
including applications and
databases-as web services.
"We needed to be able to provide
an efficient way to get back to our
data and apps. Already, a lot of
service interactions within our
walls are on the middle tier, so we
have many resources running in
the IBM WebSphere* Application
Server environment," Wilson says.
"To augment that, though, our
first goal was to provide back-end
capabilities in a RESTful way such
that we can introduce change
quicker. If the decision is made to
re-platform or if we get something
off the shelf or if something comes
from a cloud implementation
of an application, we want to
integrate all of that without
impacting our clients."
By developing RESTful APIs,
USAA would have a foundation in
place that allows it to develop and
deploy back-and-forth application
integration within days or weeks
instead of months or years. This

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